Mark Driscoll’s sermon on Philippians is fantastic. Click here to d/l and/or listen to it.

Pay close attention to the definition of religion and religious people in the first half.

Edit: I typed a bit too fast. This isn’t a sermon on all of Philippians, it is the 11/19 sermon on the first bit of chapter 3.

CR?N has a post about the Emerging Church being Catholic. I listened to the audio file CR?N highlighted. It was quite a stretch. But that wasn’t the thing that I noticed.

So then I went to The Berean Call site, produced by Dave Hunt and T.A. McMahon. Here’s the funny thing. Dave Hunt wrote a book called “What Love is This?”, which is featured on The Berean Call site. It is an “expose” on the evils about Calvinism. Here is a quote from the book:

Calvinism, if it were true, would be great news to Satan. He wouldn’t need to deceive the lost to prevent them from believing the gospel because God himself would already have consigned them to hell. As for the elect, because of irresistible Grace, Satan would be wasting his time trying to blind or harden them. There would be no point in trying to blind anyone.

And here is a description of the book from the site:

Multitudes who believe they understand Calvinism will be shocked to discover its Roman Catholic roots and Calvin’s grossly un-Christian behavior as the “Protestant Pope” of Geneva, Switzerland.

This is proof positive that anyone can link anything to anyone. What is more dangerous, Calvinism or the Emerging Church? It seems it’s a toss up.

I guess “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

*Update

I just listened to this audio file from The Berean Call. Dave Hunt says that Calvinism maligns God. He also criticizes John MacArthur’s take on Romans 5.

OK, so I was feeling rotten last night, and I’m not toally up to snuff today and I have to teach an all day class tomorrow. Needless to say, it is a time to be down in the dumps for most folks. As my wife will tell you, though, the worse I feel the funnier I get (or maybe the funnier I think I am) sometimes. Kind of like the middle-of-the-night ride to the hospital with kidney stones when I was self-medicating with laughter because the pain was so bad (you know what I’m talking about, guys).

So this morning, I crawled into the shower, forgetting that I had an extra 90 minutes before I could leave because of childrens’ snow delays, and by the time I got out of it, my attitude was much better even though my body was (and is) not.

Here was my thought:

Last week, I was flipping through the channels one evening, and I stopped for about 5 minutes on a train-wreck of a reality show, where (and I’m guessing here from my 5-minute experience) the mothers in two households are swapped and the kids and the huspands have to try to learn how to deal with someone particularly unsuited to live in their home. It looked painful, though possibly in a cathartic sort of way.

So this morning, I got to wondering if we could do a Reality TV show called “Pulpit Swap”, where we force churches to swap senior pastors (and their staffs) for a month. Here’s my tentative schedule for the opening episodes:

Week 1: John McArthur/Joel Osteen
Week 2: Mars Hill Week – Mark Driscoll/Rob Bell
Week 3: Rick Warren/Fred Phelps (Ken Silva, if FP isn’t available)
Week 4: Bill Hybels/Al Sharpton
Week 5: Twin Cities Week – Doug Pagitt/John Piper
Week 6: Edward Cardinal Egan/Benny Hinn

As I started imagining scenes of these guys meeting with parishoners and listening to responses from both them and the congregations, it greatly brightened my morning.  Heck, it might even do some of them a bit of good…